About this paper

This is a two-page "late-breaking" paper currently
under submission to the CHI '98 Conference. Due to length limitations for
this type of submission, I've probably tried to pack too much into this;
I plan to expand this into a much longer paper, so comments are welcome.
If you're interested in learning more about genre and on-line conversation
see reference 1, Virtual
Community as Participatory Genre.

Genre Theory as a Tool for Analyzing Network-Mediated
Interaction: The Case of the Collective Limericks

Keywords

INTRODUCTION

My goal is to understand the conditions behind deep, productive, coherent
interactions among large groups, so that we might design better systems
for supporting them. In this paper I describe genre theory, a way of looking
at mediated interaction among large groups. I begin with a simple, yet rich,
example of collective interaction.

COLLECTIVE INTERACTION: AN EXAMPLE

The following example is from a text-based, asynchronous conversation
in "Cafe Utne", a public on-line 'salon.' The first message-beginning
a new conversation in a conference area called "Fun"-explains
what is happening:

Here's a fun game. We write limericks, each person contributing
a line at a time. You'll recall from this example that limericks rhyme
and scan (iambic pentameter, and all that) a certain way:

...[an example of a limerick is omitted]

Limit your contribution to one line at a time, at whichever point
the limerick is at when you happen by.

Over the next six hours, five people created the following limerick:
(For brevity, the individual message headers that begin each line have been
replaced by the writers' 'initials.')

BH: I'll start:

An Internet surfer named Joe

WCC: Enjoying the World Wide Web flow,

CUP: Got hooked on a site

ENL: stayed there day and night

CLM: 'til his mother said, "Time to go, Joe"

Over the next 24 hours six new participants join with the other five
to successfully compose two more limericks.

Why This Isn't Entirely Trivial

Here we have eleven strangers working together to achieve a coherent
end. With only minimal preparation, the interaction goes smoothly and the
results are as intended: well-formed limericks. And it even seems like fun.

Too bad it's such a trivial example. Or is it? There's a lot going on.
Consider the making of the next limerick:

KMO: There once was a "spoilsport" poster,
LFB: Who played games with a rogue and a boaster,
ENL: he sent him a flame,
LFB: for wrecking the game,
KMO: And then died sticking forks in a toaster!

To interpret this, readers need to know that the word "orange"
has no rhyme in English, and that this fact is well known amongst
the more expert English speakers who are drawn to such games. KMO has cunningly
disrupted the game by making it impossible for anyone to compose a valid
next line. WCC chastises KMO (using brackets to signal that she has stepped
outside the limerick form), KMO apologizes, admitting the intentionality
of his act, and WCC invites him to "start us again. For real."

Although this example is simple, it is not artificial. The limerick conversation
has much of the richness that characterizes more complex and ordinary conversations:
people are taking turns, following rules, breaking rules, using etiquette,
'going meta' to talk about the process, etc.

Discussion

Why does this conversation work? (As of this writing, the conversation
has been going on for about a year, with over 2300 contributions.) For we
can examine many on-line conversations on the internet-in mailing lists,
bulletin boards, and virtual communities-but we will find few cases in which
strangers work together so smoothly, with so little preparation, to produce
such a coherent result.

One reason for the success of the conversation is that the participants
understood 'the rules': they knew they were making limericks, they had a
sense of what limericks were for (i.e. fun), and they knew the patterns
of rhyme and meter that make a limerick. As a consequence, at any point
in the limerick-making conversation, it was possible to say where the conversation
was with respect to its goal, and to understand what needed to be done next
to move it in that direction (or to disrupt it!). In addition, participants
had a very simple interaction model: one person makes one line at a time.
Finally, participants assumed that their understandings of the process and
content of this interaction were shared by the other participants.
Thus, the disruption-and the subsequent reprimand-were immediately recognized
as what they were (rather than as inept attempts to do limericks).

This case is important because it is an especially clear cut example
of how shared understandings enable groups to communicate effectively and
coherently. I suggest that it is useful to look at any kind of mediated
interaction in terms of these shared understandings, and that an existing
approach known as genre theory is well suited to this end.

GENRE THEORY

Traditionally, genre theory has been used to categorize various types
of writing, speech, and other media forms. It analyzes information artifacts
in terms of their communicative purpose, and the regularities of form and
substance which characterize them. Thus, resumes, to take a different example,
have a purpose, a recognizable form (short, with highly structured content),
and an expected type of content (information about the writer's qualifications).

Over the last two decades, scholars in rhetoric and literary criticism
have developed a situated form of genre theory (e.g. [2,3]) which makes
it particularly useful for our purposes. They suggest that what is important
in understanding a genre is identifying the underlying social and technical
forces which produce the regularities which characterize a genre. Thus,
the regularities of the resume genre arise from a mix of social influences
(e.g. resume readers are often trying to read quickly, so structure and
brevity is desirable), and technical influences (e.g. desktop publishing
enables the use of fonts and styles and indentation to produce highly structured
text). Likewise, the form of the collective limericks resulted from social
factors (e.g. an agreement to take turns), and technical factors (e.g. the
properties of the Cafe interface-note that it would be difficult to do collective
limericks via a mailing list!).

A final aspect of situated genre theory is that a genre is
understood, enacted, and, over time, shaped, by a group of people who play
various roles in the enactment of the genre-"a discourse community."
A discourse community may range from a few people playing one or two roles
(as with the collective limericks) to a vast, diffuse set of people with
a multitude of roles (as with those involved in the creation, transmission,
and consumption of resumes, and the mini-industry of classes, books, etc.,
that offer guidance on their preparation and use).

Genre Theory in HCI

Genre theory lends itself to a number of applications
in HCI. My interest in genre theory began while I was trying to study "virtual
community." Genre theory was useful because it shifted the focus
from community (e.g. the nature of relationships among community members)
to the information artifact produced by the community's interactions. This
shift, in drawing attention to how sociotechnical forces shaped the community's
interactions, provided a number of insights about interfaces to a virtual
communities (see [2]). Similarly, genre theory has been used to analyze
organizational communication [4]. Genre theory also applies to what the
high tech industry calls "content:" rather than treating content
as an isolated entity, it suggests examining "content" in terms
of how it is produced, consumed, and understood by its discourse community.
Another application is to understanding web sites. Web sites often borrow
genres from other media (e.g. the newsletter genre from print), but these
borrowings often fail because all that has been borrowed is the look of
the genre-the sociotechnical underpinnings are different.

When applied to the digital domain, genre theory
raises some provocative issues for HCI researchers. Traditional genres have
a marked separation between producers and consumers, and such genres tend
to evolve slowly. Neither of these conditions holds in the digital world.
Digital genres have the potential to be much more participatory, and to
hence evolve much more rapidly. An intriguing challenge for HCI researchers
and designers is to explore the implications of these changed conditions
for digital genres.

NOTES

Thanks to Leha Blaney (LFB), Bryan Higgins(BH), Clydie Morgan (CCM),
and two other participants, for permission to use their words. Cafe Utne
is at http://www.utne.com.